Monodraw ASCII Art Editor

December 11, 2014 at 9:44 pm

I’ve always want­ed to build ASCII art head­ers for my CSS — and just for fun — but never had the patience to learn the tech­niques and tricks. Consider me super happy to run across Monodraw by Helftone. It’s a drag and draw text edi­tor for Mac with ridicu­lous­ly pow­er­ful fea­tures. I’ve added my name to the beta and can’t wait to give it a shot.

Screenshot of Monodraw ASCII art text editor for Mac by Helftone, ASCII art robot

Busy, busy, busy.

December 8, 2014 at 8:41 pm

You might have noticed the post­ing fre­quen­cy here at SpareType has dropped off a bit the last few weeks. Client work has picked up and hope­ful­ly I’ll be able to share some of that soon as items get com­plet­ed. In the mean­time, here’s a huge list of awe­some things from around the Internet that have been col­lect­ing dust in my brows­er tabs. Enjoy!

The State of Web Type — Do you need to know which OpenType fea­tures are sup­port­ed in which browsers? Then here is the Can I Use for typo­graph­ic features.

Do you know how many rules, selec­tors, and dec­la­ra­tions are in your CSS? Maybe you’re curi­ous how many col­ors or font fam­i­lies are hid­den in your style sheets? Plug in your URL or raw code to CSSStats and get the breakdown.

The folks at Tower are cel­e­brat­ing OS X Yosemite with An Illustrated History of Mac OS X. The illus­tra­tions are mar­velous. I think the Lion in the space­ship is my favorite, though Snow Leopard is close too.

Turn sta­t­ic mock­ups into trans­par­ent, float­ing guides with GluePrint.

Just want to code and not worry about web servers, data­bas­es, engines, or deploy­ment? Cactus is a free, sta­t­ic site gen­er­a­tor that com­piles Markdown, SASS, and Coffeescript out of the box. It also auto­mat­i­cal­ly refresh­es your brows­er when you save changes and can deploy to Amazon S3 to make your web­site public.

Flakes is a clean, open source design frame­work for build­ing inter­nal busi­ness appli­ca­tions — think sales lead man­age­ment and inven­to­ry track­ing screens. Just look at this form for enter­ing info.

Flakes Framework Screenshot of Form Entry Screen, Admin UI, CSS framework

How to Make a Performance Budget? What should you be mea­sur­ing, how should you mea­sure it, and what should your goal be in deliv­er­ing the best web­site performance.

DeviantArt has a new brand. I love the write­up about the process, but I’m not entire­ly sold on the logo yet.

Awesome home­page and all-around awe­some web­site by the folks at Underbelly. Really nice touch­es with the URL names.

Underbelly.is - Screenshot of creative agency homepage, blue washed desktop, full screen background

Tis the sea­son for cute, wintery-themed hol­i­day icons. Here’s an awe­some free set on Dribbble.

Speaking of the hol­i­days, here’s a Christmas present I would have liked as a child. Typeblocks — maple wood alpha­bet blocks.

Typeblocks - maple wood alphabet blocks, font blocks, laser cut

Finally, let’s wrap the post up with a lit­tle self-promotion. Society6 — which I have some art­work avail­able on — has some great hol­i­day dis­counts going on this week. Be sure to check out my store and pick out any last minute gifts you still need to get.